


Unborn

by theskywasblue



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Future, Drabble, Gen, Imagination, Incest, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-22
Updated: 2010-06-22
Packaged: 2017-10-10 05:32:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hakkai draws the line between what he thinks and what he knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unborn

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "Secret Fantasies". Time taken to write: 18 minutes.

He likes to think of himself as a good man. That is, when the rain isn’t falling, when he doesn’t stop pretending long enough to realize that he is, in fact, a very bad man; the sort that no one wants to encounter in a dark alleyway.

He dreams, sometimes, of a home, of a family – a smiling wife, a red-haired child (a girl, often, but in increasing instances a boy with an easy, fierce smile). He likes to think he would have been a good father, firm, yet kind and always attentive (although, in all honesty, what experience did he ever have with fathers beyond those in cassocks?) He imagines teaching the child to read and write, to garden, cook, even the very basics of self-defence. He pictures quiet nights, busy but joyful weekend outings – first steps, first haircut, first day of school;all in aching detail, so vivid it causes him physical pain.

He imagines, above all, that he would have loved the child – half-demon product of a rape or not – as if it were his own; that he would not have held the sins of the sire against it.  That he could never have been party to such an injustice.

But there are times, when his soul is stripped bare, when even he does not believe his own illusions, that he realizes this is likely not the truth.

He is, in practice, quite the pragmatist. He can picture, in equally vivid detail, all the wounds a strong hand can inflict on the fragile body of a small child: bruises, broken bones, scars both inside and out; and he knows intimately the results: pain and sorrow behind crimson eyes, a certain nervousness, like a stray dog kicked one too many times, rendered perhaps unable to ever completely trust, but nonetheless desperate to find love.

As much as he wants to believe he would have loved the child, he knows that violence and hatred are the truth of the man he was, the man he would have been if forced to care for the product of his sister-lover’s most intimate torture.

And yet the man he is now – the man he became, nurtured from birth (rebirth) by gentle, though sometimes clumsy hands, hopeful crimson eyes and an easy smile – cannot help but think with longing on the child lost, cannot help but feel pain for all the potential wasted in the womb.

It would have been a beautiful child; he is sure. So kind, so gentle, so brave.

But then, perhaps his vision of the child that might have been is too much coloured by the man who _is_.

Reality, he thinks, although imperfect in many aspects, is perhaps the best that he could have dared to hope for.

-End-


End file.
